Get to know what your audience thinks of your pay per click (PPC) ads and your content by understanding how to measure a good click-through rate (CTR).

PPC ads help increase new traffic to your site whilst CTR presents analytics to help you understand if your ads have attracted attention and the actual clicks it received.

CTR is calculated by the number of clicks received divided by the number of impressions: 100 clicks in 10000 impressions gives you a CTR of 1%. It indicates the relevance of your ads to your chosen market and tells you whether your ad captured their attention. With this knowledge, you can work on improving your next ad by testing what can affect your CTR:

  • Channels you’re using
  • Your target audience (i.e. B2B/B2C)
  • The content
  • Your chosen keywords
  • The visuals of the ad
  • The aims, objectives and KPIs of the ad

Reports have suggested that the average CTR across all industries has averaged around:

  • Adwords: 2.69% – 3.17%
  • Facebook: 1.46%
  • Instagram: 0.62%
  • YouTube: 0.24%
  • LinkedIn: 0.26%
  • Twitter: 1.55%

The above benchmarks will help you understand if your ads have reached a “good CTR”, however, you must bear in mind the factors affecting the performance as the same content for a different ad, targeting a new audience, may not get you the same results. Nevertheless, using the above will prove to be useful when analysing the performance of each channel you have used for your ads.

Always learn from previous ads and work on improving them as a low CTR can reduce the quality score of future ads. Therefore, carrying out thorough analysis will help you create effective copy and interesting visuals for your next ad. Always ensure that your landing pages, content and website are converting to maintain high engagement levels with your audience. Don’t rely on high CTR as it doesn’t necessarily guarantee a good return on investment. Maintaining the rapport with your target audience is what converts the leads.